On June 11, 2017, I had the honor of delivering a talk at HBaseCon 2017 alongside my colleague James Moore, from HubSpot. In my portion of the talk, I described my open-source contributions to HBase’s stochastic load balancer. This post will re-cap those contributions for anyone who enjoys learning about complex systems, without requiring any knowledge of HBase. For that reason, this post will start with the basics.

During the first week of my internship at Vertica, my mentor assigned a small bug for me to fix about a set of particular SQL queries. After writing a simple fix for this bug, however, I realized something fantastic. I realized that the scope of what I was working on was much larger. This bug was just a special case of something much larger. I was captivated.

Text-backdrop is a tool I developed as my contribution to to Well Versed, a hackathon project that won third place at Hack Dartmouth 2015. Well Versed is a browser extension that, when activated, aggregates all relevant information about the topic of the current web-page and displays it all in a sidebar. Thus, anyone can become well versed about any topic they are perusing–politics, science, etc.